One question I get a lot and have addressed a couple of times before is whether or not you need to work your story out fully before you start.
Of course the only correct answer is to do what works for you. However, for screenwriting I do think it's the best strategy and that was reinforced by a project I'm working on at the moment. It's a story for a thriller TV movie which, if it goes forward, will be a German-French coproduction.
I won't go into the whole plot but basically it's about a woman who disappears while on a trip with her sister, and it becomes the sister's mission to find out what happened and in the process her self-image and what she believed to be true about her sister all change.
I worked out the basic story line for a producer a couple of years ago but, as so often happens in this business, for various reasons the project didn't go forward. A month or so ago the producer got back in touch saying they now have an opportunity to revive it.
The challenge, though, was that the German network skews to older viewers and the time slot is also one in which they don't like to have too much violence. The upshot was that instead of an action-based thriller (the original version) they now want more of a character-based psychological thriller.
Because the story already had two strands (the plot and character development) it was a matter of simply shifting the emphasis from the action to the psychology. Because the basic story was sound, this didn't require a massive rewrite so I've been able to turn it around quickly.
The need to make changes to suit the demands of a particular producer, network or studio, or even director or star is par for the course in the screenwriting world. But if you start with a solid story, you can handle the changes and, with luck, emerge with a script that still has most of the virtues you started with.
